All posts tagged Tomb Raider

Game designer Crystal Dynamics announced “Tomb Raider” sequel “Rise of the Tomb Raider,” which is scheduled to go on sale around holiday time next year. The company also released a trailer for the coming game.

The trailer shows the saga’s star, Lara Croft, speaking with a therapist after her traumatic experiences in last year’s Tomb Raider game. As the therapist talks, advising Croft to, among other things, “explore new horizons,” we see snippets of her recent adventures.

When you approach bad guys at the beginning of the new Tomb Raider, they will shout slight epithets like “she’s just a girl!” As a player, this is an uncomfortable moment—social issues that could have easily been ripped from today’s headlines suddenly invade something which you’d think was intended to be an easy, simple, and fun exercise in shooting bad guys in the face.

A few hours later, Lara Croft will be screaming back retorts like “I’m coming for you, you bastards!” while her enemies shriek, “she’s a good shot!” in abject horror. The music swells, and you’re supposed to feel triumphant as she completes her transformation into what Crystal Dynamics studio head Darrell Gallagher calls a “total badass” adventurer or explorer.

Watch out, Tomb Raider seems to say, this girl can stand her own ground. Which is always the weird thing about female protagonists in violent video games—the self-conscious awareness of developers that there is indeed some inbred and deep-seated genealogy of sexism in the game industry that makes strong female leads an oddity. So much of an oddity that when they do appear in an ass-kicking role like Lara Croft or Catwoman they must have slurs hurled at them constantly, as if to remind the player (and, perhaps more disturbingly, the heroine herself) that she doesn’t belong. Read More »

As videogames become increasingly lifelike and violent should they ever depict things like rape? The recent uproar against sexual violence in two popular videogame franchises—Hitman and the historic Tomb Raider—has brought the question to the forefront.

First, a troubling new trailer for Hitman: Absolution shows the iconic protagonist (the pale, taciturn, seemingly asexual Agent 47) assaulting an entire gang of female assassins clad in skin-tight black leather—apparently the only outfit women can find that fits in videogames today.

Hitman struck an understandable nerve, but the fame of the franchise pales in comparison to that of Tomb Raider. Depending on whom you ask, the original Tomb Raider either revolutionized the videogame industry in brilliant, nearly incalculable ways, or it doomed the entire medium to a puerile cultural morass of adolescent and androcentric cultural fantasies it still hasn’t recovered from.

The crux of this entire debate rests on the shoulders of the franchise’s central character, Lara Croft. Read More »

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